Nine garage sales. Four hours. Home before lunchtime.

We weren’t hopeful Friday morning — only nine sales on the route, which is on the lean end for our area. Then the second one we walked into had a beer-tap-handle collection on the table, and the day was made before we’d had coffee at half the others.

This post walks through what we picked up and what we paid. The headline buy is the tap-handle lot, but the morning had a lot more in it than that — paperbacks, vintage signs, a $5 jewelry-box gamble, Culver glassware, a pair of platforms Candice may or may not get into.

The big sale — about $230, mostly tap handles

One sale carried the morning. The math at this stop:

Lot	Paid
30+ beer tap handles	$150
~100 vintage sci-fi paperbacks (+ a few hardcovers)	$40
3 vintage signs (incl. one Sailor Jerry tiger sign)	$35
Other miscellaneous from the same sale	~$15

The tap handles

The collection skews heavily New Orleans and South Louisiana — local breweries, Mardi Gras references, regional inside jokes. A tour of what came home:

• NOLA Brewing Company — multiple. The standout is Darkest Before Dawn with the swamp scene; a Tchoupitoulas IPA (named after the New Orleans street, which has tripped up out-of-towners for generations); and a Rebirth Brass Band tribute handle with what’s either a tuba or euphonium worked into the design.
• Mucuses — the all-female Mardi Gras parade krewe.
• Abita / The Boot.
• Cinjun Brewing — Bayou Brunette, “Certified Cajun” stamped on the bottom.
• Beeta Brewing Company — Big Easy, with a fleur-de-lis on top and what’s pretty clearly an Art Deco-inspired wood engraving.
• Bell’s Inspired Brewing — wood with an inset nature scene. We’ve already comped this one — it’s around $60-70 by itself.
• Boston Logger — torch design on top. Possibly a marathon or Olympics tie-in. We didn’t track that one down yet.
• Southern Craft Brewing Company — a wood handle we’ve actually seen hanging in restaurants and bars before. Comped well.
• A handmade-looking handle from the Coco area that may have been one-of-a-kind for somebody’s camp on the South Louisiana coast — those camps are a whole regional thing, and a handmade tap handle for one is exactly the kind of single-buyer collectible Etsy is made for.

We’ve already comped three of the handles at $80-plus each before researching the rest of the lot. Lonnie’s read: there are probably some $15-20 pieces in there, but with that many handles and that much regional density, the math works.

The condition is honest mixed. Some are perfect; several are resin and have small chips where corners broke off; one looks like it had a steamboat on top of it that’s no longer on top of it. We’ll list them honestly, with photos that show the chips.

The sci-fi paperbacks

About a hundred vintage sci-fi paperbacks with a small handful of hardcovers mixed in. The seller had them priced at $1 each. We worked them into a $40 lot deal for the whole table.

A lot of repeat authors — multiple Asimovs, multiple Heinleins, you can see the previous owner’s reading habits in the duplicates. Some have a “unicorn” stamp, almost certainly from a used bookstore that had them before this seller did. Condition is good-enough-to-sell, not pristine. Sci-fi paperback lots have always done well for us — vintage genre paperback collectors buy by the box, not by the title.

The signs

Three vintage signs, $35 total for all three. The keeper from this batch is the Sailor Jerry tiger sign that Candice is not letting back into inventory. It sells for around $120 in good condition, and this one isn’t horrible — but it’s also a near-mirror of the tiger tattooed on her arm, so it’s going on the office wall.

(Lonnie’s general policy is anti-keep. He folded fast on this one. Sometimes that’s just how it goes.)

The other two we’ll list. We comped about ten signs total at the sale and these were the three that priced in for resale.

The mystery jewelry box — $5 at a family estate sale

Different sale entirely. Candice spotted it on a kitchen counter with a $5 price tag.

She opened it. It was full of watches.

She asked: “Is the $5 for the whole thing or just for the box?” They said: whole thing. Money changed hands.

Inside, in a not-fully-inventoried first pass:

• A Citizen, a Pulsar, a Fossil, an Aqua Indiglo (Timex), a Lady Elgin, a Wam, an Armatron, a Fasar
• A Seiko with a diamond-cut crystal that’s gorgeous — even before any restoration this is the kind of watch face that a collector buys on sight
• Tangled earrings, including a crawfish/lobster pair (one of each ear)
• Various pendants and small bits, mostly costume
• A bracelet labeled “Speidel USA” — almost certainly plated, not solid
• One or two pieces that might be gold. We don’t know yet. Probably aren’t. We’re not going to claim they are until we test them.

Lonnie’s framing on this kind of buy: “I’d rather do this than buy a scratch-off ticket.” Five bucks for a box guaranteed to have at least a Seiko and an Indiglo in it, with a non-zero chance of something better lurking in the tangles. Worst case it’s pure entertainment.

The first sale — Culver glasses and a few small lots, $8 total

The first sale of the morning, before any of the above. Walked up, saw gold from across the lawn, and Candice flagged a row of Culver glasses at 25 cents each. We took them all for $8.

Lot	Paid
Culver glasses (Valencia pattern, possibly)	$0.25 each / $8
Two Stitch plush (same design — bundle them)	included
Gola tennis shoes	$2
Monster High mini-puzzle lot	$1.25 total

The Culvers aren’t the cleanest set we’ve ever picked up but the gold pattern is intact, which is what matters. Culver’s gold detailing holds on better than most gold-detailed glassware — chemistry we don’t fully understand and don’t need to — so even worn-bottom pieces typically present well.

The Gola shoes were almost a $12 mistake — Lonnie thought he saw $12 on the price tag and asked Candice if they were good. (For what it’s worth, Lonnie almost never asks Candice if shoes are good.) They were $2.

The Monster High puzzle pile we’ll lot up — somewhere around $20 if they all stay together.

The smaller hauls — across the rest of the route

A few odds and ends from other sales:

• Brand-new bear traps — $5. Not Molly’s size, and not Molly’s style anyway (she likes solid colors, not patterns).
• Harajuku Mini backpack — $1. Going to bundle with a Harajuku Mini pencil case we picked up at last week’s stuff-a-bag sale for a combined ~$20-25 listing. Harajuku Mini was Gwen Stefani’s old Target line; Candice dressed Molly in it when Molly was little, so this find got a smile.
• Y.R.U. Gloomy Bear platform shoes — Y.R.U. is a Dolls Kill brand, and the Gloomy Bear series is genuinely rare. These are in pretty good condition — a few scuffs, not abused. We’re estimating about $100, possibly more. The buyer is somebody between performer and goth-leaning teenager, and Dolls Kill’s resale market does these well.

What we expect to recoup

The math we’ll do as we list. The early signal:

The tap-handle lot is the headline; three of them already comp at numbers that recover what we paid for the lot, and the remaining 27 are mostly $15-20 pieces with at least a couple more in the $60-plus range. Bell’s Inspired Brewing alone is a $60-70 piece. Boston Logger and Southern Craft are both worth real money. There may be one or two genuine $100+ rarities still in the lot we haven’t researched — Lonnie has a feeling about a couple of them.

The mystery-box gamble is exactly that — Seikos clean up to be sellable on their own, Indiglos move at $20-30 a pop, Lady Elgins have a vintage-women’s-watch market, and if any of the “might be gold” pieces test out, the rest is gravy.

The paperbacks sell as a sci-fi collector lot. Sailor Jerry sign goes on the wall. Culver’s stay listed until somebody who collects Culver finds them.

That’s the plan. We’ll see how the listings actually shake out — the real numbers come in over the next week or two as the listings go live and the first ones move.

We had a really good time today, y’all. Thanks for coming along on the haul. We’ll see y’all in the next one.